No Logical Limitations

One of the great difficulties with distress is that it narrows our vision of the world. In fact, that seems to me a definition of what distress does, it keeps us from seeing the universe clearly. In the diagram in the Human Side of Human Beings the distress recordings muddy up, fill up, that immense space of intelligence of the mind. When we co-counsel, too often, we allow the person to stay focused on distress and to look at the world through the eyes of distress. One of the things that is a little misleading is that they may be discharging rather well... I don't think it is something you should interrupt in the first 8 weeks of co-counseling class. But I think if we kept in mind all the time that people will move a lot more quickly out of their distresses if they look at the universe the way it really is, we will keep trying ways to keep the attention out of the distress - it is what we called in the Manual "The Balance of Attention." Then we will keep that balance of attention more and more on the side of reality, on the side of the way the universe really is, and discharge will come much more quickly and much more totally, instead of being a few trickles of tears... A similar step is one totally away from hopeless/helpless. The step is saying, "you know, the world is going to change and I am going to make it change." To do that is to let the discharge really come up over the horizon.

I think we all know just exactly the way the world is, but we tend to forget it, and conditioning helps us to forget it. In the "Complete Appreciation of Oneself," Harvey talks about there being NO LOGICAL LIMITATION WHATSOEVER to our total appreciation of ourselves - none whatsoever and that is the phrase that he uses: No logical limitations to total self-appreciation. In your co-counseling sessions, explore, push your appreciation to its absolute, INFINITE breadth and see what happens. See what comes up that limits your perception of how absolutely, incredibly wonderful you are in every way. How you are a genius. How you are a beautiful, beautiful, physically beautiful entity. How proud you are that your creativity is absolutely limitless. How your capacity for changing the universe is absolutely limitless. I can even hear my distresses coming up. (LAUGHTER)

It is almost as if there were two polarities, one is the underlying reality and the other is distresses that we impose on ourselves so fully that we do have a kind of false reality... Harvey wrote that article "Is Death Necessary" years and years ago, and now scientists are coming up with research that says there is no reason that we shouldn't all live at least 800 years. So, on the one hand my distresses say to me "Well, look, my athletic prowess is certainly limited by the fact that I am 44 years old and that my body is not as young as it used to be." But even there I think we have to look and ask ourselves "How much of this is distress?" I don't think that we can go wrong by pushing this all the way and every time that we get a little voice that says "Now wait a minute, maybe there is a logical limitation here," say "Maybe not." We need to explore it all the way, pretending that there is no logical limitation.

Another big area - there is NO LOGICAL LIMITATION TO OUR LOVING OTHER HUMAN BEINGS. Every time we put any limitation on our love of any human being in the universe, it is distress. There are all kinds of ways to work on this. One of the major ways to work is just by total other appreciation, just do it. Don't work on it necessarily by saying how awful you are and how awful you feel... work on it by pushing your love all the way. Just total. I think we should all push ourselves to take the hardest people for us in the whole world and express our total love and appreciation of them. Do it! In your sessions, push hard all the way and see what happens.

In, The Human Situation, is the article "Who's in Charge?" In this area, we push "THERE ARE NO LOGICAL LIMITATIONS TO OUR RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS UNIVERSE." There is a line that says "We are responsible for the farthest atom on the farthest star, in the farthest galaxy in the universe." If you put any logical limitations to our responsibility, then logically, in a sense, we totally limit it. We have to acknowledge that our responsibility is for the infinite universe. I think we knew this when we were little. I am quite sure that we were born knowing this. When we talk about it now we feel that it is a "should" and I think it was simply a joyous part of being alive, and, of course we were responsible for the whole universe. That was our very nature. Of course we would undertake everything and make the universe exactly what it ought to be. We were part of that process which I think a lot of people have named "God Process;" that process in the universe of making things happen, of creating, of choosing. We were part of it and it was not a big "should," just joyous energy. There are some problems about which we think "that's hopeless, I can't change that. I can't change the economic system in the United States. I can't change the war here or there. I can't do anything about that. I can't do anything about pollution." Take the biggest, biggest issue you can think of and entertain the possibility that you, not so much singlehandedly, in the sense of a total change, but singlehandedly initiating whatever might need to be done, that you can do it! I think that there are a lot of people on the earth who have done that. They have made mistakes, but they have somehow decided that singlehandedly, all alone, they would change the universe, AND THEY HAVE. They've done it!

The last area is that there is NO LOGICAL LIMITATION TO THE REALITY THAT THE UNIVERSE IS OUR ALLY in this process. This gets complicated - this is where I get a little stuck sometimes. I say to myself "What about oppression, what about earthquakes, what about tornadoes, what about aging?" And again, if you look at the essence of the process of the universe then you can see the reality, that it is our ally. There is an article that Harvey wrote that was published in Present Time a while back called "Me State of the Cosmos" that was an incredible article, and I think what it did for a lot of people was move them another step out of hopelessness. It was a scientific article based on the observation that there are obviously two processes at work in the universe. There is the process that is expressed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics - the entropy process, the waste process, the death process. We can't deny that it exists. But at the same time there is the organizing process, and that is just as real and just as obvious. There is the process of evolution, the process of life getting more and more organized, more and more integrated, more and more intelligent, more conscious. Human consciousness is the highest consciousness that has ever been on the earth so far. There is no reason not to assume that evolution is pointing in that direction, of higher and higher consciousness, of higher and higher organization and order. After Harvey wrote that article, several scientists wrote him letters. I wish I knew more about the Second Law of Thermodynamics to tell you exactly what they said, but the essence of those letters was that, the Second Law of Thermodynamics did not apply to whole systems, that it applies to pieces of systems, and that Harvey was absolutely right. In terms of the whole universe, the organizing law is triumphant and stronger than the other one. And possibly that the other one is even, in some way that is difficult for us to see at this time, an integral part of the organizing process, that death and entropy and decay are integral to the primary force of organization and evolution. So, in that sense, the universe is our ally. I think we intuit this and I think human beings have called this the religious, spiritual, mystical experience. We intuit this before we have scientific data to back it up.